Reply to DH pushing for solar panels

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]I posted above about the math not adding up. FWIW, we have solar + batteries. I think that the solar was a probably worthwhile investment for us, the batteries were just because we wanted them. Honestly, the batteries were a tech splurge more than anything else - though it is nice to know that we'd have some backup power in the event of a long outage.

Agree with the posters asking about the age of your roof. We have a brand new, south facing roof with no trees, so it's the perfect setup for solar. Plus we're planning to stay here for 20+ years. We probably wouldn't have made this investment with an older roof.

Would strongly recommend getting a couple of quotes, plus spend some time digging in to what that battery investment is going to do. You might have to talk to the engineers to really understand it - we thought that some of the salesmen didn't really understand the nuances of the battery systems. My bet is that $10k in batteries probably won't get you too much backup anyways. We spent more than that, and only have some of our circuits on the back system - for example, we should be able to run heat in the winter, [b]but wouldn't be able to do ac during a summer power outage [/b](though we would have ceiling fans, refrigerator, and lights in most rooms)[/quote]

In the summer there are more hours of sun so you would probably be okay. If it were a cloudy summer day then yes, you would probably have to conserve. What I like about having the power wall is that it is quiet, comes on instantly in an outage and requires no testing every month to make sure it works, etc. We have had ours come on several times now and it's seamless. If you have someone older who needs that security for health reasons, it becomes more than a price decision. [/quote]

No - our AC is NOT one of the circuits included on the battery backup system, so my understanding is that it will not be powered during a power outage.  We haven't been through a summer power outage yet, so it's possible that this will work differently that expected, but we had many, many conversations with electricians and the system engineers and they said that our battery setup wasn't large enough to handle the surge that comes when the AC starts, so they didn't include the AC on the backup system.[/quote]

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